This is an election season about the rich, the richer, and the richest. As it should be, since multimillionaires are running for election, and on their way to the presidency, hanging out with the folks who will have the most access to them after the coronation. In this regard, just like in the election polls, Hillary Clinton has Donald Trump beat. As The New York Times reports, fund-raising and schmoozing on the Clinton campaign trail is going swimmingly well, even if it has meant that the usual bread-and-butter events like news conferences, speeches, and rallies have been consigned to the sidelines:
Mr. Trump has pointed to Mrs. Clinton’s noticeably scant schedule of campaign events this summer to suggest she has been hiding from the public. But Mrs. Clinton has been more than accessible to those who reside in some of the country’s most moneyed enclaves and are willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to see her. In the last two weeks of August, Mrs. Clinton raked in roughly $50 million at 22 fund-raising events, averaging around $150,000 an hour….And while Mrs. Clinton has faced criticism for her failure to hold a news conference for months, she has fielded hundreds of questions from the ultrarich in places like the Hamptons, Martha’s Vineyard, Beverly Hills and Silicon Valley.
“It’s the old adage, you go to where the money is,” said Jay S. Jacobs, a prominent New York Democrat.
Mrs. Clinton raised about $143 million in August, the campaign’s best month yet. At a single event on Tuesday in Sagaponack, N.Y., 10 people paid at least $250,000 to meet her, raising $2.5 million.
If Mr. Trump appears to be waging his campaign in rallies and network interviews, Mrs. Clinton’s second presidential bid seems to amount to a series of high-dollar fund-raisers with public appearances added to the schedule when they can be fit in. Last week, for example, she diverged just once from her packed fund-raising schedule to deliver a speech.
There ain’t no fear and loathing on this campaign trail, one that winds through the playgrounds of the rich and the powerful, just old friends getting together over caviar, canapes, and champagne, swapping stories about the old days, looking ahead to returning to the White House–AKA ‘the Fat Cat Motel’–and the good ol’ days of sleepovers in the Queens Bedroom and the Lincoln Bedroom. Perhaps, after dinner, Bubba will play the saxophone in the smoking lounge while Chelsea looks through her Rolodex and dreams of 2032. (Charlotte will have to wait a little longer.)
It was never going to be any other way. Once the debris of the hopeless dreamers and idealists had been brushed off the path, there was only one cavalcade that was going to roll down it. The ‘old adage’ works the other way too; the money goes where the power is. Let us not be surprised then, once the smoke has cleared after this election, if the priorities of the new administration show a distinct slant, if its manifestos show the imprint of dollar signs.
